8 January 2013 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks publiccomments on the current draft ofthe candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard. The GPKG Standards Working Group willconsider all comments when preparing a final draft of the candidate standard.
Mobile device users who require geospatial application services andassociated data and who operate in disconnected or limited network connectivityenvironments frequently do not have open, available geospatial data to support theirapplications. Applications include such things as mobile workforce data captureand updates, volunteered geographic information, and real time annotations ofmap data in an emergency event.
The candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard provides an open,non-proprietary, platform-independent container for distribution and direct useof all kinds of geospatial data. The GeoPackage container and related API willincrease the cross-platform interoperability of geospatial applications and webservices in the mobile world. StandardAPIs for access and management of GeoPackage data will provide consistent queryand update results across such applications and services.
Future enhancements to the GeoPackage standard, a future GeoPackageWeb Service standard, and modifications to existing OGC Web Service (OWS)standards to use GeoPackages as exchange formats will allow OWS to supportprovisioning of GeoPackages throughout an enterprise or information community.
Interoperability of GeoPackage implementations by several participantsis being tested and will be demonstrated in the 15 January 2013 OGC Web Services Testbed (OWS-9)Demonstration. The current reference implementation bases, SQLite and SpatiaLite, areopen source resources developed by OGC members. The SQLite referenceimplementation is sponsored in part by the SQLite Consortium, which includes anumber of OGC members. SpatiaLite is built on OS-Geo open source libraries bythe president of GFOSS.it and others.
The current draft of the candidate OGC GeoPackage (GPKG) Standard can bedownloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/95.
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies,government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating ina consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGCStandards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web,wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empowertechnology developers to make geospatial information and services accessibleand useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visitthe OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.
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